Wednesday, April 13, 2016

How Mana Became a Game Mechanic

Together with University of Hawai'i anthropologist Alex Golub, I wrote an essay about the origins of "mana" in tabletop and computer games. Alex previously distilled our work into a popular blog post about this, but people interested in the details of early concepts of spell points and how they came to be attached to the idea of mana will find more information in the academic version. Pioneers here included Greg Costikyan, Steve Perrin, Isaac Bonewits, Richard Garfield and many others.

Our essay "How Mana Left the Pacific and Became a Video Game Mechanic" appears in the newly-published anthology New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures (ANU Press), which you can acquire in print versions or download online here: New Mana.

There definitely was a lot of confusion about the distinction between Biblical manna and Pacific Islander mana at the time, which is discussed in the article. But as the article shows, the science-fiction authors like Niven who seem to have directly inspired the earliest attempts to implement mana in role-playing games (to say nothing of Magic: the Gathering) seem to have gotten this from the Pacific Islander concept.